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Tag: Ubuntu

In August 2012 I had chosen to move to Ubuntu 12.04. It was a long-term support edition and I was expecting it to be one ridiculously stable build. “Precise Pangolin”, as it was known, was the successor to 11.10 and got excellent reviews. I had originally installed 11.04 (another LTS) and had (almost installed) upgraded to 11.10. Then, I upgraded to 12.04 in a hope to cure some of the woes that had transcended upon my laptop as a result of 11.10.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10

Precise Pangolin solved many of the issues that I had seen in 11.10. I had no Xorg issues, power management was much better, and even my woefully unusable Alpine trackpad seemed to work much better. Yet, I periodically saw weird “Ubuntu 12.04 has experienced a system crash….” type errors. It was time to see if 12.10 was any better.

Quantal Quetzal would be another upgrade. After launching “Update-Manager” and choosing to see distribution upgrades, I opted into the process of updating to 12.10. At first, this process errored–Google revealed that this error was common and that installing afresh would be the real solution.

Meanwhile, I thought I would give Ubuntu Unity a try. Continuing to improve, this window manager has gradually grown to be stable. Update-manager automatically launched to notify me of updates and I tried the upgrade procedure once more. To my surprise, it worked!

So far, it is fast. I’ve used it and have been impressed so far. I really have no flaws, to speak of, in the distribution. I like it!

One thing I will mention; I believe it is noteworthy. During the upgrade, the installer came to the point where the new kernel was to be installed. Through past kernel installations, the /boot partition had become full–only having 7 MB of free space. In past distribution upgrades, the installer would have stopped (having realized the problem) and would have most likely exited. At worst, the installer would have paused to give the user the opportunity make the repair on the spot.

Conclusion

In this new edition, recognizing that the distribution version was different, the installer removed old kernels (images and headers) automatically. Windows would not have shown the change, past Linux distributions would not have MADE the change, but this current version showed me exactly what was happening. I greatly appreciated such. I like the fact that it did show me, rather than not, because as a Linux user I am a concerned about what happens to my machine.